Boosting results through properties

Optimizely Search & Navigation has default properties, such as Title, Summary, and Content, that are automatically mapped to corresponding content properties. Each property has a weight setting that affects search result rankings. You can adjust the weight settings, which is called boosting.

Boost weight settings if your site has specific and well-defined content types. For example, if your site hosts scientific articles whose summaries are generally well-written and of great importance, increase the Summary weight so it has a greater impact on search rank.

Changing weight settings

1. From edit view A section of the user interface where you edit content items, such as pages and blocks. To access edit view, log in and select CMS > Edit. (See admin view for comparison.), select Search & Navigation > Configure > Boosting. Default properties appear on the left of the screen.
   • Title. Content title. For CMS content, it is typically the Name if not specified by the developer. For crawled content, it is the <title>-tag. For custom types, title is by default the SearchTitle property, if not specified by the developer.
   • Content. Web page content.
   • Summary. The introduction, summary, abstract, or similar property type.
   • Document content. The content of an asset, such as a PDF or Word document.
2. In the Weight column, click a box to change a property's weight.
3. Click Save.

Notes about changing weight settings

• To test the impact of property weight changes, click Preview the boosting effect from the right side of the Boosting screen.
• To revert the changes, click Reset to default values from the Boosting screen, under the list of properties.
• These settings affect search results for all content types and all languages on all websites in your implementation.